Meet Roland the Farter: Medieval England’s Celebrity Flatulist
Updated: Aug 30
In the age of chivalry, monasteries and monarchs, land was rarely handed out lightly. Yet in 12th-century England, one rather singular individual managed to secure a manor and a substantial stretch of Suffolk countryside not through valour in battle or ecclesiastical service, but by passing wind on command. Roland le Petour, remembered to history as Roland the Farter, held his land from the king in exchange for one performance a year: a jump, a whistle and a fart, delivered before the entire royal court every Christmas Day.
Quick Answers
Who was Roland the Farter? A 12th-century court entertainer who held land from King Henry II in exchange for an annual flatulent performance.
What did he actually do? Once a year, on Christmas Day, he performed 'unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum': one jump, one whistle and one fart, in front of the king's court.
How much land did he get? Sources vary, some cite 30 acres, others as much as 110, roughly the size of a full hide, in the manor of Hemingstone, Suffolk.
Is this documented fact or legend? Fact. Roland appears in the Liber Feodorum, the Book of Fees, an official 13th-century register of English feudal landholdings.
A Serious Tenure for a Comic Turn
Roland's curious arrangement was recorded in the Liber Feodorum, a formal register of landholdings held directly from the Crown. His estate at Hemingstone, Suffolk, was held under what's called a serjeanty, a form of feudal tenure rendered in exchange for personal service to the king rather than knightly combat. Most serjeanties of the period were mundane by comparison: providing a horse and rider for royal campaigns, supplying firewood for the household, carrying the king's banner, or managing the royal kitchens. Roland's was very much one of the unusual ones.
Accounts of exactly how much land came with the arrangement differ. Some sources put it at 30 acres; the fuller Latin record in the Liber Feodorum suggests closer to 110 acres, close to a full hide, the rough medieval equivalent of one-fifth of a standard knight's fee. Either figure comfortably outstrips what a prosperous freeholder of the period might expect to hold, which was usually closer to thirty acres, while a cottager might have five. Whatever the precise number, Roland's fart was, by any contemporary standard, extremely well paid.
The record itself survives in the original Latin: Roland was obliged, every year on the Lord's birthday, to perform before the king one leap, one whistle and one fart. Far from being a humorous footnote in an otherwise serious system of medieval landholding, Roland's entry underscores the sometimes bizarre confluence of duty and entertainment in the royal courts. That the arrangement was recorded at all, in the same register used to track military obligations and royal revenue, suggests a genuine degree of official recognition, however undignified the terms may now seem.
A Family Business
The earliest firm documentation of Roland's role dates to 1159, during the reign of Henry II, though it's unclear whether he'd already been performing the trick under Henry's predecessors. What is documented is what happened to the manor after Roland himself was gone: it passed to his son, Hubert de Afleton, then to Hubert's son Jeffery during the reign of Richard I, and finally, in 1205, to Alexander de Brompton, who held it through his marriage to Agnes, Jeffery's sister and Roland's own granddaughter. The performance itself likely didn't pass down with the land in quite the same literal sense, since no record shows three generations of the same family repeating the trick at court, but the manor and its unusual feudal history clearly stayed within Roland's bloodline for at least two further generations.
By the reign of Henry III, the mood at court had shifted. Roland's unique talents were evidently no longer welcome, judged indecent by more puritanical tastes, and the serjeanty was eventually dissolved. The best-known trace of the village today is the parish church of St Gregory, which still stands in Hemingstone, part of the same small Suffolk community that was once, quite literally, held together by a fart.
Odd Tenures That Outlived Him
Roland wasn't the only person in medieval England holding land in exchange for a strange personal duty, and unlike his, some of those arrangements never actually died out. The manor of Scrivelsby has been held for centuries by the Dymoke family under the obligation of serving as the King's Champion, historically required to ride into the coronation banquet and challenge anyone present to deny the new monarch's right to the throne. The manor of Worksop, similarly, was held on the condition that its tenant support the sovereign's right arm during the coronation itself. When ordinary knight-service was formally abolished in England in 1660, these ceremonial grand serjeanties were specifically kept on, precisely because they were seen as honours rather than burdens, and versions of both duties are still performed at British coronations today. Roland's own arrangement, judged too undignified to survive even a couple of centuries, makes for a pointed contrast: some medieval service tenures were considered timelessly dignified enough to outlast the feudal system itself, while his was quietly retired as an embarrassment.
Medieval Wind: Morality and Mortality
But why farts, specifically? Beyond the obvious comedic value, flatulence carried real theological weight in medieval thought. Gas was widely understood as a byproduct of bodily decay, morally and doctrinally tied to human mortality itself. Medievalist Valerie Allen, author of On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, has argued that farts and excrement were routinely moralised in this period as a living daily reminder of humanity's mortal, sinful nature.
Seen that way, Roland's act may have carried an undercurrent of memento mori, a bodily reminder of humanity's base nature dressed up as courtly entertainment, whether or not anyone in the audience consciously registered it as such while laughing along.
A Tradition with Deep Roots
Roland wasn't alone in putting his backside to professional use. Medieval Ireland had its own recognised class of entertainers, known as bruigedoire or braigetori, court farters who some texts suggest dined with the High King of Ireland himself, implying real social standing rather than mere novelty. John Derrick's 1581 illustration The Image of Irelande shows two such performers at work in the corner of a banquet scene. For a look at another figure whose entire livelihood depended on the medieval body doing something faintly gruesome or absurd, our piece on a day in the life of a medieval executioner covers a very different, considerably grimmer branch of the same era's working world.
The tradition wasn't confined to Britain and Ireland either. Among the Innu people of Canada, Matshishkapeu, literally the Farting God, is a significant mythological figure, credited with the power to grant or withhold gastrointestinal relief and said to have once cursed a rival deity with agonising constipation before eventually relenting. Saint Augustine of Hippo, writing centuries earlier, recorded claims that certain individuals could produce musical, odourless sounds from their own bodies, seemingly in something like harmony.
Japan had its own version too. Edo-period misemono street shows featured performers in the freak-show tradition, including one documented in 1774 known as Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko, who produced musical flatulence by ingesting and releasing air in stylised bursts. An earlier tradition dating back to the Kamakura era, roughly 1185 to 1333, describes heppiri otoko, farting men who danced for the entertainment of the aristocracy.
The Legacy of Le Pétomane
Roland's clearest spiritual heir arrived seven centuries later in the shape of Joseph Pujol, better known by his stage name Le Pétomane. A fixture of Belle Époque Paris and the Moulin Rouge, Le Pétomane elevated professional flatulism to genuine vaudeville stardom, imitating musical instruments, extinguishing candles from a distance and performing what he billed as anal control.
Author Jim Dawson, who's written extensively on the cultural history of flatulence, has described the specific comic effect of a dignified gentleman in a tuxedo announcing each sound as though introducing a musical solo. Despite, or perhaps because of, its niche subject matter, Le Pétomane drew enormous crowds and became one of the era's genuine celebrities.
Flatulism in the Modern Age
Today, the art has largely retreated to the fringes of YouTube and internet subcultures, a long way from royal Christmas courts and Belle Époque theatres. In a world increasingly governed by contracts, professionalism and decorum, there's something quietly subversive about a man who won royal favour, and held property, entirely through a well-timed bodily joke. Roland le Petour lingers as a strange and windy footnote in the history of English land law, feudal service and royal entertainment, proof that laughter, especially the undignified and involuntary kind, has long held real power even in the highest of courts. For another slice of medieval England at its strangest, our piece on the bizarre phenomenon of Saint John's Dance covers an altogether different, considerably less comic kind of collective medieval body horror.
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Sources
7. Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
8. John Derrick, The Image of Irelande, 1581
9. Jim Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart
10. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book 14
